I n the Al Hajar Mountains of northern
Oman, at the eastern edge of the Ara-
bian Desert, high above the white ter-
races and minarets of Muscat, rain comes
rarely and then in floods. Hajar means
"rock" in Arabic, and the mountains are
made of little else-a fractal landscape of
umber and dusty limestone, thrust from
the sea more than sixty-five million years
ago and still shaped more by salt water
than by sweet. When the clouds burst, as
they do a few times a year, the rain skit-
ters from the slopes like oil from a grid-
dle, gathers into rivulets and swifdy mov-
ing sheets, and tumbles into the wadies
that wind between peaks. The ancient
Omanis built networks of aqueducts and
underground falajes to funnel the water
to their crops. Oases of mango, date
palm, sweet lemon, and lime still survive
on this system, their fruit knuckled in on
itself against the heat, smaller and more
pungent than their Indian ancestors. But
on most slopes the only traces of green
are a few umbrella-thorn trees, Acacia
tortilis, anchored to the bare rock. Their
roots can descend more than a hundred
feet in search of groundwater.
"I t used to be much wetter here when
I was a boy," Hamad Reesi said, as our
S.U.V.lurched up a gravel switchback in
the foothills. ''You never had to buy fod-
der for your goats." Ali al- Abdullatif
nodded, then yanked the steering wheel
to one side to avoid a dropofE Next to
him, Pieter Hoff dozed in the passenger
seat. Abdullatif is the chairman of the
Horticultural Association of Oman, a
slender, cultivated man more comfort-
able potting plants than going on desert
excursions. Hoffis a Dutch inventor and
former tulip and lily grower who had
come to Oman to test an experimental
tree-planting device. We'd spent the past
few hours bumping over back roads,
stopping every few minutes to look at
trees that might be good for Hoff's proj-
ect: hardy natives like Ziziphus spina-
christi, said to have provided the thorns
for Jesus' crown, and Salvadora per sica,
the toothbrush tree. Its fibrous twigs
were laced with fluoride and antiseptics.
Word had it that this area was home to
one of the last baobabs in northern Oman,
but we'd got lost trying to find it and had
picked up Reesi, a local farmer, as a
guide. The great tree was deep in the
mountains, he said. We would never
reach it on our own.
112 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 19 & 26,2011
Abdullatif and Reesi wore the tradi-
tional white robes and embroidered
prayer caps of Omani Muslims. They
were born and raised here-although
Abdullatif had done his horticultural
training in England, at Canterbury Col-
lege, in Kent-and had seen the country
transformed, in forty years, from a near-
medieval land of warring tribes to a
unified and oil-rich sultanate. When
Abdullatif was a boy, firewood was
still gathered by Bedouin nomads and
brought in by camel; water arrived by
donkey in goatskin bags and barrels once
filled with ghee. Now the coast was dot-
ted with desalinization plants and it was
sometimes hard to tell that Oman was a
desert nation. Along the boulevards and
highways of Muscat, the medians were
as lush as croquet lawns. Weeping casu-
arina trees lined the shoulders between
beds of petunia, bougainvillea, and topi-
ary trimmed like battlements. The sultan
was said to be an environmentalist-he'd
recently decreed the construction of the
country's first botanical garden-and he
wanted his capital green.
The illusion didn't last beyond the city
limits. Most of Oman averages less than
six inches of rain a year-barely enough
to sustain native plants, much less thirsty
exotics like the petunias. On the north-
ern coast, long known as the country's
fertile crescent, so much groundwater has
been tapped for farms, orchards, and
date-palm plantations that salt water has
seeped into the aquifers. "Look at this,"
Abdullatif told us at one point, gesturing
at a line of dead palms along the road,
their fronds decaying to dust on the
d " c 1 d ."
groun. amp ete estructlon.
When we reached the top of the first
pass, Abdullatif pulled onto an overlook
and killed the engine. The sun was set-
ting, the road getting harder to follow,
and he seemed ready to turn back. "I
don't like the drops on the sides here," he
said, as he got out of the car. "These sheer
drops. They do not make me feel very se-
cure." After a while, Hoff shook himself
awake and joined Abdullatif outside. Tall
and pale, with a bladelike nose and a
thinning crown of blond hair, he was
built for cooler climes. Perched beside
the dusky, heavy-lidded Abdullatif, he
looked like an egret about to snack on a
lizard.
'What if the car stops?" he said. "Is
there a hotel here?"
''Yes, a very big, open hotel. We have
one banana left. We share it."
Hoff laughed. To the west, the high
peaks of the AI Hajar rose rank upon rank
into the coppery sky, the empty plains half
in shadow below them. 'We have a say-
ing in Holland," he said. " 'If you call out
in the desert, no one will hear you.' " But
I knew what he was thinking: not so long
ago, these mountains were covered with
desert junipers and groves of bitter olive.
What would it take to bring them back?
T he desert is a good place for vision-
aries. It can flower in the mind even
as it withers at your feet. About a third of
all land on the planet has been claimed by
it-almost twenty million square miles-
and the percentage increases every year.
Where rain is scarce and the ground is
stripped of trees, where soil is eroded by
the steady beat of sun, hooves, and sea-
sonal farming, a landscape can turn to
dust in a generation. "These are real des-
erts that are being born today, under our
eyes," the French botanist André Au-
bréville warned in 1949, when he popu-
larized the term "desertification." "The
desert always menaces." In the past cen-
tury, over most of the globe, the amount
of dust in the air has doubled.
It's an old story in some ways. Deserts
have been advancing and retreating for
much of the earth's history, driven by tec-
tonic shifts and planetary wobbles be-
yond our control. The Sahara and the
Arabian Peninsula haven't been green for
thousands of years. What has changed is
the fact that global warming is making
climates more extreme. Regional rainfall
is hard to predict in the long term, but
most models agree on the over-all pat-
tern. "The wet will get wetter and the dry
will get dryer," Isaac Held, a research sci-
entistwith the National Oceanic and At-
mospheric Administration, told me. By
the end of the century, according to the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change, rainfall could decrease by fifteen
to twenty per cent in the Middle East
and by twenty-five per cent in North M-
rica. "That's a lot;' Held said. The recent
drought and famine in Somalia, which
has killed tens of thousands of people and
driven many more into Kenya and Ethi-
opia, is a preview of things to come.
To Hoff: the solution seems straight-
forward. If we can replant the forests lost
to desertification, he says, we can provide